String Quartet looks to mix it up
Good chamber music programming presents one (well, at least one) serious challenge: How do you get real contrast in a concert that involves only four instruments with basically the same sound?
The Spokane String Quartet will answer the challenge Sunday afternoon at The Met with three quartets that maximize the quartet’s contrasting sounds.
The program begins with Haydn’s Quartet, Op. 76, No. 4 (nicknamed “Sunrise”) and ends with Dvorak’s Quartet, Op. 106, with Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 13 featured as the afternoon’s centerpiece.
“We started by deciding to do the Shostakovich and then chose pieces that would be very different,” says Kelly Farris, the quartet’s first violinist. “It’s not as easy to do an all-quartet program where we don’t have a guest soloist.”
Other members of the quartet are violinist Tana Bachman, violist Jeannette Wee-Yang and cellist Helen Byrne.
Along with the six string quartets of Bela Bartok, the 15 quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich represent the great achievements in 20th-century music for the genre.
“Late in his life Shostakovich wrote a series of four quartets, each dedicated to a member of the Beethoven Quartet, which premiered all his quartets except the first and the last,” Farris says.
“This one is dedicated to the longtime violist of the Beethoven Quartet and the viola part is unusual and astoundingly difficult.”
Shostakovich finished this work in 1970 while he was undergoing treatment for a polio-like paralysis.
“There is a kind of mystery in this piece where he calls for some thwacks made by the bow hitting the instruments, sounding like a woodblock or a guitarist hitting the instrument with his knuckles,” Farris says. “And then there is a section which is jazz-influenced. I don’t think there is a single really restful moment in it.”
As for Haydn’s “Sunrise,” he says, “We were looking for something that would be a great contrast with the Shostakovich. It’s so gentle and soothing in a way that the Shostakovich definitely is not.”
All three quartets on Sunday’s program were written late in the careers of each composer. Dvorak’s Quartet in G major was written after he returned to Prague after living in New York for two years.
“I’ll have to admit that this is my favorite Dvorak quartet,” Farris says. “You can hear how he loved nature in the twittering of the birds at the beginning, how he loved the sound of trains in the steady rhythms of the finale, and how much he looked back in old age to his childhood in the folk dancing you can hear in the last movement.
“And he organizes this quartet so that it’s rounded out by quoting things from earlier movements but completely transforming them. It is very deep, very satisfying music, profound without ever becoming morose.”